Roundtable: The History of Childhood & Youth: Meg Eppel Gudgeirsson

November 12, 2018 By Julia M Gossard in Childhood & Youth, Interview, Interviews with Historians, The History of Childhood & Youth Tags: childhood, Mormonism, nineteenth century, Oneida, religion, youth Leave a comment

If you missed previous posts in our new roundtable series on the history of childhood and youth, click here. Stop by Wednesday for the finale of this roundtable series!

Today we welcome Dr. Meg Eppel Gudgeirsson, expert in nineteenth-century U.S. religious history and childhood. She completed her PhD from the University of California, Santa Cruz in June 2016. Her dissertation, “Perfect Child, Perfect Faith: Raising Children in Nineteenth-Century Communities,” is a study of how four religious communities raised their children in an effort to embed their differing goals and identity in future generations. The United Society of Believers (better know as Shakers), Oneida Perfectionists, Church of Latter-day Saints (Mormons), and Berea abolitionists all created specific communities grounded in their unique interpretations of Christianity in an effort to reform and improve American life through challenging rural and bourgeois notions of family, gender, and race. She is currently working on expanding her research on Berea, exploring the role of children in the community’s goals of integrating education in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Dr. Gudgeirsson is a lecturer in the History Department at Santa Clara University, teaching courses on nineteenth and twentieth-century US, California History, and World History. Continue reading →

Roundtable: The History of Childhood & Youth: Holly N.S. White

November 2, 2018 By Julia M Gossard in Childhood & Youth, Interview, The History of Childhood & Youth, Vast Early America Tags: age, childhood, law, nineteenth century, youth 1 Comment

If you missed previous posts in our new roundtable series on the history of childhood and youth, click here. On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays for the next few weeks, stop by to read about challenges and realities of researching and teaching childhood and youth across vast early America.

Today’s interview comes from Holly N.S. White (Ph.D., College of William & Mary) who is an assistant editor of Publications and Digital Projects at the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and an assistant producer of Ben Franklin’s World: A Podcast about Early American History. She specializes in the history of age, childhood, and youth as well as the histories of gender, family, and law in the early America. Her research focuses on the definition and negotiability of age in early American law and society, which is the subject of her forthcoming first book, Negotiating American Youth: Age, Law, and Culture in the Early Nineteenth Century. Be sure to check out Holly’s Junto piece from last month, ““young appearance”: Assessing Age through Appearance in Early America!” Continue reading →

Commodities and Agents in the History of Slavery

October 19, 2016 By Tom Cutterham in Book Review, Roundtables, Slavery's Capitalism, Special Features Tags: capitalism, Gender, historiography, nineteenth century, Slavery 1 Comment

This contribution to the forum comes from Justin Leroy, an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at UC-Davis. Prior to joining UC Davis in 2016, he was a postdoctoral fellow in global American studies at Harvard University. He is at work on his first book, Freedom’s Limit: Racial Capitalism and the Afterlives of Slavery.

Slavery’s Capitalism offers a tremendous amount of evidence to support what scholars of slavery have long known—that slavery underwrote nearly every aspect of American economic development for over two centuries. These essays provide unprecedented detail about the precise workings of slavery’s role in the rise of American capitalism and will inspire many future research projects. Beckert and Rockman’s introduction is an ambitious piece of historiography, drawing together a diverse array of subfields and intellectual debates. Work such as Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism and Ian Baucom’s Specters of the Atlantic, while key texts for interdisciplinary scholars working on questions of racial capitalism, are not often acknowledged by historians of the “new history of capitalism.” The introduction’s scope makes it an excellent primer for specialists and non-specialists alike. It is the most comprehensive of the recent review essays on slavery and capitalism, yet the breadth of this introduction is not matched by the essays within. Continue reading →

Slavery’s Capitalism Forum: Introduction

October 17, 2016 By Tom Cutterham in Book Review, Historiography, Slavery's Capitalism Tags: history of capitalism, new history of capitalism, nineteenth century, Slavery 2 Comments

Slavery’s Capitalism has been a long time coming. The conference from which this book arose was held at Harvard and Brown Universities in spring 2011—years before the New York Times lionised a “new history of capitalism,” co-editor Sven Beckert won the Bancroft Prize for his Empire of Cotton, or fellow co-editor Seth Rockman surveyed the field in the Journal of the Early Republic. The conversations and ideas aired at that conference have been part of public scholarly discussion for the last five years, including many posts here at the Junto. Now we have the book itself, and we want to congratulate the editors and authors for their perseverance! Continue reading →

Review: Maura D’Amore, Suburban Plots: Men at Home in Nineteenth-Century American Print Culture

August 26, 2014 By Katy Lasdow in Book Review, Historiography, Recent Scholarship Tags: A.J. Downing, architecture, book review, domesticity, Gender, Henry David Thoreau, Henry Ward Beecher, Maura D'Amore, nineteenth century, Rip Van Winkle, suburban, Suburban Plots, Washington Irving 1 Comment

**Maura D’Amore, Suburban Plots: Men at Home in Nineteenth-Century American Print Culture. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2014.**

Suburban Plots Cover The world was a strange and startling place for Rip Van Winkle when he awoke from a twenty-year nap in New York’s Catskill Mountains. He had ventured to the woods to find a moment’s peace from “the labour of the farm and the clamour of his wife.”[1] Now well rested, bountifully bearded, and slightly disoriented, Van Winkle returned to his village anxious to understand the changes that left him “alone in the world,” but pleased that he was now part of a “more fraternal, organic domestic order.”[2] In the time since his fateful game of ninepins mixed with moonshine, Van Winkle, along with his male village compatriots, was now free to exercise his own masculine alternatives to traditionally female forms of domesticity. Maura D’Amore opens her book Suburban Plots: Men at Home in Nineteenth-Century American Print Culture with this unconventional reading of Washington Irving’s well-known tale. Seeking to understand the emergence of what she terms “male domesticity” in the nineteenth century—defined (somewhat inconsistently) as an ideology of “self-nurture in suburban environments [that provided] an antidote to the malaise of urban life and the strictures of feminine self-sacrifice”—D’Amore presents Rip Van Winkle as a prototype of various middle- and upper-class men who attempted to implement domesticity “on [their] own terms” in the midst of a quickly industrializing and alien world.[3] Continue reading →